Europe spawns its best ideas during moments of crisis. Socrates after the Peloponnesian wars. Augustine during the collapse of Rome. Kant and Hegel in the wake of the French Revolution. Waves of Existentialist, Structuralist and Critical Theory after the catastrophe of World War II.

This is not to make a virtue of calamity, merely to note how deep ruptures of culture can provoke radically new philosophies. Or as Holderlin put it, "where danger is, there remedy comes." Thinking can be dangerous and remedying.

I think Europe today is witnessing another cultural mutation. The old ideologies of communism and capitalism have proved bankrupt and recent elections in France, Greece and Ireland - for example - raise fundamental challenges to start again: politically, economically, intellectually.

Jean Monnet, when he first conceived of the European community in the 1950s, declared that "Europe would be cultural or it would not be at all." He was right. No real change is possible in Europe without new ideas - and change there must be. The question of a new civic society has become, once again, a matter of urgent public debate.

The recent election of a committed philosopher and poet, Michael D. Higgins, as President of Ireland, has created what he himself calls a "Presidency of Ideas." Within weeks of the vote, he was delivering bold critiques of postmodern capitalism and calling for a new "post-nationalist constellation" sponsored by philosophers like Jurgen Habermas in Germany and Gianni Vattimo in Italy.

These thinkers, among others, recognize that the orthodoxy of nation-state sovereignty - based on the fantasy of a single and indivisible people - needs to be surpassed by new models of shared civic responsibility, cultural interdependency and participatory democracy. The alternative, as recent European elections also indicate, is a relapse into tribal populism.

With the election of Francois Hollande as President of the French Republic, change has been energetically informed by a chorus of philosophical commentaries. Le Monde featured lead articles by over twenty philosophers in the lead-up to the vote. And Hollande himself engaged in brilliant dialogue with veteran French intellectual Edgar Morin on the eve of the 6 May election. "There can be no victory of politics without victory of mind," was a recurring chant at the Bastille celebrations.

The urgent cultural issues now being debated throughout Europe - where several philosophers hold parliamentary posts - include: the role of religion in secular life, the nature of identity in post-national economies and global communications, the tension between communitarian and liberal ideologies on questions of justice, debt and public service, as well as on-going thinking about multiculturalism and immigration.

These issues are as relevant today to the United States as they are to Europe. Both continents face the same upheavals of transnational culture. But the crucial question is: are we witnessing similarly vibrant discussions in the United States in the lead-up to the November election? Do ideas really count as much in American public discourse?

There was a time - one thinks particular of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements - when ideas mattered hugely. Just recall figures like Marcuse, Arendt, Chomsky, Popper and Sontag - to name but a few - making a decisive mark on public debate.

Can one say the same today? Or has fundamental questioning retreated to the groves of academe? Recent public intellectuals have not, it seems to me, been afforded pride of place in mainstream public discussion, more often being confined to intellectual journals or alternative communication outlets.

Too often the big questions of meaning and value become matters of populist controversy - on commercially driven media - rather than reasonable conversation. I find it dispiriting to turn on National Public Radio in the United States these days to find so much time devoted to fundraising with cheap consumer enticements and kids' party prizes. This is a deplorable requirement for cultural reflection.

One of the privileges of being a citizen of any self-respecting European state today, despite manifest economic problems, is having access to state-funded national media where the moral mind of the community is widely debated.

Such rigorous intellectual discussion is often facilitated by publically financed education systems, at both high school and university levels. Indeed in several European countries philosophy is a required subject in high school. And one bold proposal of the new French government is to introduce 30,000 new teaching posts.

Having personally taught in several European and American universities, I feel great sympathy for countless American students today entering the job market with an albatross of debt around their necks. It is hard to imagine students taking to streets or occupying airwaves if they are working multiple jobs to pay back "college loans." Occupy Wall Street came and went; Wall Street is still there.

I am not proposing the return of philosopher kings. We have all learned from Plato's mistake. I am simply asking if philosophy today might play a more committed and influential role outside of academia and elite publications. And I am wondering if the recent interventions of philosophers in key policy decisions in Europe might provide parallels for public life elsewhere - one thinks specifically, though not exclusively, of the United States.

I do not wish to beat the old drum of Europe versus America. Neither continent is on the side of the angels. My question is more basic: could philosophy make a genuine difference in current debates on the future of the Western mind?

I applaud the application of philosophy to issues of pressing public concern in columns like The Opinionator or the New York Review of Books - and, indeed, the ABC's Religion and Ethics website. One only hopes that such urgent intellectual exchange might find its way into concrete policy discussions in the United States and beyond.

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and is Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Nice. His most recent book is Anatheism: Returning to God after God. His is in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil Lecture in Human Value at Australian Catholic University.

Actions

Share

Comments (11)

josh :

16 Jun 2012 12:37:35pm

I was hoping for a bit more depth in this article. Yes, public debate needs to be philosophically informed, sure, but in precisely what way? Of course, philosophy cannot be ignored, as some hard-headed pragmatists would have it, because to do so is itself to posit a philosophy that is simply not thought through. It is better to acknowledge the necessity of thought, stop dealing in platitudes, and start thinking! I want to hear more on the question of what concrete institutional reforms (and aren’t institutions just the embodiment of philosophical ideas?) can occur to strengthen our ailing societies. Maybe even hard questions concerning the limits of parliamentary democracy need to be debated. What are some practical ways to make contemporary political cultures less degraded?

Murray Alfredson :

12 Jun 2012 10:31:14pm

Perhaps I am a bit cynical over a philosophy of politics.

Lord Acton was an historian, not a philosopher, but he said it: All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. WE had our very own taste of that nonsense once Howard got control of the Senate.

I had respect once for the American constitution, built on the doctrine of the separation of powers, except that even there the Executive arm gets to appoint the judges. to the Supreme Court. And there is still plenty of room for foul play behind the scenes, and the pushing of lying spin.

Can the philosophers find a solution to all that morass? I much doubt it.

NancyEthics101 :

12 Jun 2012 7:09:11pm

"My question is more basic: could philosophy make a genuine difference in current debates on the future of the Western mind?"Short answer, yes. Would love to see a few more philosophers around the place. I do query the 'Western mind' bit of the question though in the light of "new models of cultural interdependency".

John :

13 Jun 2012 1:48:59pm

Both Richard and Nancy are on to something profoundly important when they refer to the future, and thus the limitations of the Western mind. Because more than anything else it is the Western mind in both its secular and so called religious forms that has generated the current global crisis.

The Western mind pursues knowledge of a certain kind and then uses it in a certain way. The Western mind is always in confrontation with matter, or Nature, assuming power over natural laws and events, over masses of human beings, and ultimately over everyone and everything. Such a process seems natural, but it is not. It is a cultural disposition or presumption.

Since ancient times there have been intelligent men and women who were just as rigorous in their pursuit of knowledge as scientists are today. They conceived of knowledge in terms other than Western Man and therefore put their knowledge to different uses. They were characterized by a different disposition. Theirs was essentially a culture of contemplation wherein one entered into a state of ecstatic unity with whatever it was they were considering.

It is the Western disposition which is always actively and intentionally disassociating itself from the asana of Prior Unity, with nothing else controlling it, informing it, or modifying its behavior, that is producing our present political and social difficulties. It has been doing so for a very long time - long before the enterprise of science, as we now know it, existed. Whenever Western Man has found a way to achieve power, and therefore advantage, over both natural forces and masses of other human beings, that is what he has always done. And is still doing so, even more than ever before.

In our day it is science, not religion, that is persuasive. It is scientism that is dominant. The whole frame of mind and the dissociated objectifying orientation to the world created by scientism is the popular persuasion in our time.

Religion has become a secondary popular persuasion that no longer has the force of scientism.

Scientism is essentially a dissociated, analytical way of relating to everything including human beings. Its mood is doubt. Thus, when the attitude of scientism becomes the way of life, the mood of doubt becomes the mood of existence and the condition, mood, and emotion of objectifying dissociation, and all the habits of dissociation become the program of everyones existence, with NO exceptions. That is precisely what has occurred via the culture created by scientism.

When it becomes the popular attitude, science produces the dissociated human being, in the form of each and every one of us.

Every minute fraction of our common "culture" communicates and thus reinforces this situation.

Michael Viale :

Hudson Godfrey :

13 Jun 2012 5:41:51pm

Scientism? Really? How many self identifying adherents to scientism do you know?

If there something wrong with the idea that we seek falsifiability then I puzzled as to why? As much as the lines between scientific practice and philosophical ideologies gets blurred when we start to associate the one with the other, at some point we still have to practice science in such a way as to prioritise the utility of predictive results.

Unless you're telling me you know of another way that has been nearly as reliably predictive then I think you're probably arguing something tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

John :

16 Jun 2012 1:40:27pm

You could try Vedic science which, thousands of years ago, thorougly investigated dimensions of our being-existence that are not even acknowledged by Western science.

Modern secular science began as a method for investigating the structures and workings of processes in the realm of Nature. As it developed, the method of science was presumed to be a superior method, in contrast to the superstitions, conventional beliefs, and metaphysical presumptions of traditional religion. Over time, the method of science has become more than an intellectual method for the discovery of specific knowledge about perceptible events and phenomenon. Unfortunately it has become the reigning and distinctly authoritarian "official philosophy" of our time. The method of science has become not merely a means of gathering natural information, but the very principle and exclusive model for the relationship human beings presume to the natural world, to each other, and even to their own body-minds. Such reductionist science, or scientism, or scientific materialism, presumes to be the only "officially acceptable form of relationship to anything whatsoever.

Although the scientific method of enquiry serves as a useful means of analytical knowledge, it utterly fails as a right and true form of moment to moment relationship to things, to living beings, and to the totality of existence.

If scientism is allowef to become the standard of relationship itself, the natural process of human participation - even non-verbally, or non-conceptually, and even egolessly - in the always spontaneously arising play of existence is retarded, suppressed and even destroyed.

The scientific method is, fundamentally, an exercise of the verbal mind in relation to events as perceived by the autonomic nervous system. As such, the scientific method is only a partial development of the potential of the total body-mind to perceive and experience.

Furthermore, by its very nature, the scientific method requires a stark and strategic separation between the observer and the observed. When this exercise becomes the primary mode of one's relationship to things, to all experience, and even to the totality of existence, its effect is separative. A kind of warfare thus develops between human beings and all their relations. Thus, scientism becomes the hard-edge-driven technology of personal and collective egoity.

John :

16 Jun 2012 2:16:45pm

Part 2.

Scientific materialism has become the popular and chronic form of the everyday approach of all people to all of the events of experience. As a result, the primary intrinsic process of participatory relationship itself has become disturbed. Scientism would pretend to be able to create a true and superior human culture, founded on technology and analytical knowledge. Yet, in fact the scientific method has no capability to create a true human culture because it suppresses that which is primary in and of man. Which is the intrinsic capacity of our non-verbal inherence and participation in the World-Process in which we are inherently one, or completely entangled.

Human beings are inherently one with the World-Process, or the Unity of all spontaneously arising beings and events. Human beings are only secondarily knowers about the World-Process. Therefore, if human beings adopt a form of relationship to the World-Process that is founded on separation and separative action, rather than on intuitive and compassionately ego-surrendering participation in Unity with the World-Process, then people will tend, more and more, to interfere, and even lose sympathy with, their own Unity both with the World-Process and the Living Divine Reality.

The Living God has thus effectively become dead or non-existent. Such was the significance of Nietzsche's famous declaration.

This dreadful situation has already occurred. As a result human beings are now in the midst of a dehumanizing, anti-religious, anti-Spiritual, and anti_Transcendental, and even anti-cultural, and post-civilization technological revolution of the entire order of humankind. Or put in another way, the unitive, intuitive, ego-transcending, ecstatic, and particpatory culture of humankind is being displaced and prevented by the authoritarian propaganda associated with the now world-dominant paradigm created by the cult-religion of scientific materialism.

Many traditional religionists would like to pretend that they can provide an alternative to the scenario pointed to above. Indeed there is quite a large and growing industry devoted to this futile project. mUch of it being funded by the Templeton Foundation.

Unfortunately such is a futile exercise because they too, have been patterned in their body-minds and thus their thinking, by the dominant paradigm of scientism.

Hudson Godfrey :

20 Jun 2012 11:05:09am

John,

If you think that science makes claims for itself that it can't prove then I think you're simply wrong. Whereas if you think that others make philosophical or metaphysical claims for science that aren't particularly scientific then you may be right, but then that's their fault not science's.

If you think science has little to say about matters of a genuinely spiritual nature then I think you're right up to a point, though the ability to debunk charlatans and other opportunists is I think a good thing. Whereas what science is inclined to say about some religious beliefs is that they're simply not falsifiable and therefore uninteresting in scientific terms regardless of how captivating they are otherwise.

In order to do science we require some basic assumptions like, reality exists, we can learn something about it and that models that are predictive have greater utility. Call them beliefs in our ability to gain understanding if you like, but what you don't address properly in my view is the idea that some spiritual beliefs may occasionally apply to a different standard of utility that either compliments science or in the view of believers exceeds it.

Setting up a divide between spirituality and science establishes a kind of false dichotomy that says that the answers are to be found in one or the other but not in both. When this in turn leads to religious licence to believe things that are simply incompatible with reality, then I do have to say that a world view that ignores spirituality does so at some considerable expense.

To accommodate beliefs in virgin births while simultaneously claiming to know something about why it is you simply have to reject stem cell research is so contradictory as to be positively dangerous. So from the kind of scientific perspective that regards its purpose as spiritually fulfilled in terms of how it decides where greater utility may lie then I think the possibility exists that knowledge exists to be used rather than feared or ignored.

On the other hand if science says something about reality and religion rejects science, then in so doing it may be rejecting a somewhat useful model of reality without ample justification in terms of what it offers in its stead. The answer to why one might be spiritually fulfilled by giving into fear or embracing ignorance seems patently absent to me!

Michael Viale :

12 Jun 2012 5:46:29pm

Hmmmmm...

Because, as we all know, philosophers are the only ones who ever come up with good ideas. Although I shudder to think what might happen if we let the critical theorists design public policy. The result might be a bit like that Simpsons episode in which Homer is asked to design a family car.

'"There can be no victory of politics without victory of mind," was a recurring chant at the Bastille celebrations.'

You mean they were actually chanting this?? Sounds a bit long and convoluted to be adopted as a chant - ignoring, for the time being, its utter meaninglessness. Those Frenchies and their public pseudo-profundity!

"These thinkers, among others, recognize that the orthodoxy of nation-state sovereignty - based on the fantasy of a single and indivisible people - needs to be surpassed by new models of shared civic responsibility, cultural interdependency and participatory democracy."

Wow. So the professional thinkers have finally caught up to the idea that Europe should aim towards a single political union. Were they alerted to this by the signing of the Treaty of Rome (1957), or by the fact that they were able to cross the French-German border unimpeded on their last continental holiday? Either way, it's good to see they're thinking about things that were set in motion 60 years ago. No flies on these blokes.

On the Wider Web

In his vastness and mobility, G.K. Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate - the phenomenon known to early-20th-century newspaper readers as "GKC" was half cornucopia, half content mill.

Unfortunately, coverage of this debate by the mass media is typically one-sided and emotive. Viewers, listeners, and readers are subjected to a succession of heart-rending human interest stories of sick or paralysed people who want assisted suicide. As the saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads." These stories seem designed not only to tug on public emotion, but to tug it in one direction: toward legalization. To the extent that opposing views are aired at all, they are often caricatured as "religious" - despite the fact that legalization has long been opposed by secular bodies like the World Medical Association.

Best of abc.net.au

Turning sunlight into electricity

A pilot facility claiming to be the world's lowest-cost energy plant has opened in Victoria.

Subscribe

How Does this Site Work?

This site is where you will find ABC stories, interviews and videos on the subject of Religion & Ethics. As you browse through the site, the links you follow will take you to stories as they appeared in their original context, whether from ABC News, a TV program or a radio interview. Please enjoy.